I get some version of this email two or three times a year, usually from a firm administrator who has just finished a license audit:
“I noticed that your account is listed as an Internal User in our repository and is therefore consuming one of my paid Internal Member licenses. Do you need it? If not, can I delete it and use that seat for my temporary contract paralegal?”
It’s a fair question and the instinct behind it is a good one — unused seats are real money. But the premise is wrong, and acting on it costs the firm money instead of saving it.
The Good News: You’re Not Paying for Our Seat
NetDocuments gives the firm a consultant license at no charge. It’s added automatically as part of working with a partner, and it is not billed against your Internal Member count.
Here’s why nobody knows that: in the Admin Console, it looks exactly like every other Internal User. Same account type, same list, same place in your user count. There’s no badge on it and no separate section. The only place the difference shows up is on your invoice.
Which means a license audit run from the console will always miscount it. You count 26 Internal Users; you’re paying for 25, and the extra one looks like the consultant sitting in a seat you bought.
If the Seat Goes, So Does Our Support
I’ll be direct about the consequence, because it’s the part that gets left out of these conversations.
Everything a firm calls us for — Workspace and Cabinet configuration, Profile Attributes, Filters, security groups, ndOffice and ndMail troubleshooting, cleanup and refiling runs — happens in the Admin Console as an Internal User with admin rights. There’s no lighter-weight account that does this work. External Users can’t be Administrators at all.
We can’t support a repository we can’t log in to. So if you remove the account, we’re no longer supporting the firm. That isn’t a penalty, and it isn’t a negotiating position. It’s just what’s left when the access is gone.
The good news is that NetDocuments’ own tech support is genuinely good. If your setup is stable and your questions are day-to-day user questions — how do I restore a version, why won’t this document check in, how do I share this with a client — their team handles that well. What they don’t do is design work: Cabinet and Workspace redesign, migrations, restructuring something that was built wrong four years ago, firm-wide training, practice management integrations. That’s the consulting side, and it’s the reason to leave the account in place.
The Bottom Line
If you need a seat for a temporary paralegal, buy the license. It costs the same whether our account is there or not.
Deleting your consultant’s account doesn’t lower your bill by a dollar. It gives up a license NetDocuments hands you for free, and it ends the support relationship in the process. Check your invoice against your console before you touch anything.
Not Sure Whether Your NetDocuments Internal User Licenses Are Right?
If your seat count and your invoice don’t line up, or you’re not sure which accounts are actually costing you money, we’ll go through it with you — usually in a single call.
Schedule a free consultation at go.oncehub.com/optconsult.
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